Penguins. What bizarre, unneccessary, amazing birds. They've inspired Batman villains, they've danced in "Mary Poppins," they've been shot out of Muppety cannons. One penguin who stands proudly apart from the rest of the flock is Opus.

Opus was one of the main characters in Berkeley Breathed's long-running comic strip "Bloom County." It was highly successful, politically adept, and well-drawn, and at the height of its popularity in 1989, Breathed pulled the plug on his own creation. Well, mostly. Breathed became the first cartoonist to go from a daily grind to a Sunday-only strip with "Outland"...and Opus was one of the few characters he took with him. That lasted through 1995, when Breathed retired again...until late 2003, when he started a third cartoon starring the penguin, appropriately titled "Opus."

Breathed has put out "Opus: 25 Years of his Sunday Best" just in time for Christmas gift-giving, and it's a very good collection. The lion's share (or possibly SEA lion's) of strips come from the Bloom County period, but Outland and Opus both get enough space to appreciate the continuing evolution of the penguin.

And what an evolution it's been! In the earliest strips, Opus is definitely a penguin...with a small little beak, adopted by Binkley instead of a dog. Opus soon learns to talk by watching television (mostly "Mister Rogers" and "Gilligan's Island" from the look of things) and the rest is history.

This book is great for anyone who's a fan of any of Breathed's work...it's fascinating to watch his skills as an artist and scripter evolve. His form becomes more and more surreal, with floating landscapes, and his ideas get bigger and bigger until you can sense his frustration at being contained by the medium. He eventually broke away from comic strips to learn to paint, and painted six books...but now has returned to the Sunday pages.

My favorite strips are from Bloom County--there are about a dozen main characters, and I love all of them: Steve Dallas, womanizing lawyer; Milo Bloom, budding young journalist; Binkley, bedwetting neuroses incarnate; Cutter John, a wheelchair-bound hellion; Bill the Cat, who starts out as a Garfield parody and goes downhill from there; Oliver Wendell Jones, an African American boy genius; Portnoy, a sadistic gopher that has a heart somewhere... Opus is obviously the star of these selected strips, and with good reason--he makes an excellent everyman--someone who can be the voice of the reader without projecting too much of himself and alienating us. We sympathize with his plights of impatience, his flights of fancy, and his sense of frustration with his lot in life. Some of the most memorable Opus moments are in this batch of goodies, but there are several greats in the other two sections.

I had problems with Outland from the get-go...sort of like "AfterMASH." Breathed kept Opus and Bill the Cat, but got rid of all of my other favorite Bloom County residents...and brought in a few new (inferior, in my eyes) characters. These included Ronald-Ann and Milquetoast (a cockroach) and a bizarre Mickey Mouse clone that they didn't ever refer to as Mickey. These strips often faltered, and only picked up when characters like Steve Dallas and Oliver Wendell Jones resurfaced in Outland. In a brief introduction, Breathed himself admits that people might not be able to make a connection to a Sunday strip that they do with dailies...it's not a part of their everyday life, it's an afterthought. That's how I felt about Outland. An afterthought. This book is a great way to see the best of Outland--and to my surprise I ended up enjoying this section quite a bit. I'm not a fan of the strip, but I appreciated the humor and artwork in the pages there.

The third and smallest section (of necessity) is "Opus." This is where we see Breathed's artistry unleashed. He draws bigger pages, uses digital coloring, and gets some truly great canvasses in there. We discover that Opus has been living in Antarctica for nearly ten years, and he finally realizes he has to return to the states. How get gets there involves a jilted bride, a NASA rover, and some nice satire with a customs agent. When he comes home to Bloom County, everything's changed...and we, with Breathed, realize that this will be the big mystery of "Opus"...how he finds his way back home. He doesn't find it in the book.

In the "Opus" strips published since the book, he's started finding his friends--and I hope we see more of them. Just in the last month Steve Dallas has returned, and Bill the Cat has become a regular. I hope the strip continues long enough to bring more of a "family" feel to Opus' community...a sick, twisted family, but one where he doesn't seem as alone as he does in the strips selected for the book.

This is a great collection of Berkeley Breathed's work, and if you know someone who owns all of the Bloom County books, this would be a great gift for them. I had thought Breathed's work had come to an end; happily, it's continuing on...including one of my favorite little penguins, Opus.

Recommended: Yes